SwarmFarm Robotics started in 2012 in Emerald, Queensland, a town of about 14,000 people. The founders, Andrew and Jocie Bate, are farmers. They were not trying to build a robotics company. They were trying to fix their own paddocks.
What they built
SwarmBots are small, self-driving robots that roam a paddock on their own. Cameras and AI computer vision spot each weed, and the robot sprays that weed and nothing else. The old way is to douse the whole field.
That one change is the whole business. Spray the weed, not the paddock.
The numbers
- 220,000 operating hours clocked by the fleet
- Over two million hectares of Australian farmland covered
- Roughly 200 SwarmBots working right now
- Millions of litres of farm chemicals saved
- Big cuts to herbicide use and fuel emissions on customer farms, by the company’s account
The raise
SwarmFarm closed a $30 million Series B led by Belgian agritech fund Edaphon. $7 million of it came from the Federal Government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation. The money is funding their push into North America.
My read
This is the kind of company Australia should be loudest about. It came from people who had the problem themselves, it works in the real world, and it is already exporting. One of the most advanced autonomous farming companies on the planet came out of a town most people could not find on a map.